May 21, 2002 Vol. 1 Issue 38<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>Pages 5-6

roster, comprising 14% of our membership. PP Andy Astom, himself a physician-surgeon, noting the large number of medics in our organization, once asked me to check the rule book. He was afraid that we have already violated a Rotary regulation limiting the total percentage of members belonging to one major classification. I did look it up but I did not find any such specific rule. Of course, I was Club President at the time and I did not really want to find any regulation that would make it more difficult for me to hit my membership targets. Anyway, nobody’s complaining. Till now, our Club continues to recruit doctors as members and leaders: Tante Licudine, an EENT specialist, was elected Club President although he temporarily declines in order to fulfill a personal commitment. The Editor-in-Chief of our current “The Gold Leaf”, which to my mind is the best version since I joined the Club, is Edward Gaerlan, a Pulmonary specialist I, on the other, PP and future Editor-in-Chief, am a specialist in Radiology. If you know the etymology of the word “Radiology” and know that I am a physician, you can guess that I studied Radiation, both ionizing (X-ray) and non-ionizing (ultrasound) in order to diagnose and treat diseases. There is not truth to the rumor that I am a “closet voyeur” out to further his skills as a “Peeping Tom”. Although I deal with a lot of nakedness in my line, I don’t let any prurient thought interfere with my work. Admittedly, I once mentioned, as a “put-down” for a colleague bragging about his exploits with women, that I have seen and handled the “private parts of half the

adult female population of La Union. This, of course, was said in jest, without malice, and without mentioning any salacious detail. So please stop arching your eyebrows and continue sending your wives, girlfriends, sisters and daughters to me for “mammograms and transvaginal sonograms.”

If you think that being able to peep into people’s bodies is really “cool”, then you would consider being able to look into people’s minds, well, “mind-boggling.” That is the ultimate aim of the newer imaging technology, like MRS (Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy) and PET (Position Emission Tomography). In a tentative way these modalities show various parts of the brain “light up” when one is sad, happy and so on. If a patient’s moods change or if he thinks certain thoughts, the pattern of brain “enhancement” changes. Researchers speculate that eventually we might be able to say with 100% accuracy, if a person is lying about something or not. That is, of course, after we exclude the psychotics who are out of touch with reality, which is easy to do. Just think about it. If you suspect a person stealing something or murdering someone, you don’t brag him to court. You bring him to the Radiology Section of a hospital for scanning! The first question of Rotary’s 4-Way Test, would not just be a hypothetical query, but something we can check and enforce. We would be able to reform society by exposing the corrupt and deceitful. Of course, I may be over-optimistic. Hasn’t Ex-President Joseph Estrada admitted to being “Jose Velarde”, but still we are nowhere near a conviction? Whatever, technological advances we make, there will always be a role for well-meaning people, like Rotarians, in the war against poverty, hate and ignorance.